Saturday, 23 February 2013

Three cheers for Lord
Krebs! I already liked this reluctant Peer
of the Realm because he opposes badger culling. But this week his lucid brain
has cut through the chaos surrounding Britain’s policy on free-to-view access to journal articles publishing the findings of research which has been supported
by the British taxpayer.

She's in gold but the background is green

This week the Science
and Technology Committee of the House of Lords, which Krebschairs, published a reportwhich slams the bewildering apology for
a ‘policy’ formulated last July by the people who are supposed to be twittering sense on
the top branch of Britain’s intellectual tree, the Research Council UK.

The RCUK had to revise
its ‘policy’ because the government had commissioned Dame Janet Finch to report
on alternative Open Access strategies.She said you could have (1) a ‘green’ policy (in which all research must
be published online so everyone can read it, but there can be a temporary
embargo of e.g. a year so journals including those published by impoverished learned societies can get subscriptions). Or you could have (2)
a ‘gold’ policy (where the journals are freely available online but academics
or universities now have to give money to the publishers) [yuck]. Or you could have
(3) a ‘hybrid’ one and let chaos prevail.

A Sensible Policy

I am still waiting to be told whether Dame
Janet chose the colours because her relatives are either greenfinches or
goldfinches, or whether she was picked for the job because of her name.

Is Rylance a bluefinch?

The
RCUK’s apology for a ‘policy’, to be implemented only 5 weeks from now, was published in
response to Finch under the chairmanship of Professor Rick Rylance (who prefers
to sport blue). It managed to recommend all three at the same time: ‘the Gold option provides the best
way of delivering immediate, non-restricted access to research papers’ but RCUK
is not against the green model and supports a ‘mixed approach to Open Access.’

How much
money are chairpersons of the RCUK paid to promote such conceptual pandemonium?

A rich journal publisher

But Lord
Krebs, bless him, has signed off the report which simply says that ‘lack of clarity in RCUK
policy and guidance, and the consequent confusion, especially given the
imminent start date of 1 April 2013, are unacceptable.’

I have a theory why Krebs can see the nests so
well in these particular trees. His own research has been into ornithology
and he is regarded as the world leader on bird behaviour. He was never going to
tolerate Rylance confusing two species of finch.

Saturday, 16 February 2013

It is a huge relief that
nobody--especially none of those terrified schoolchildren--seems to have been
seriously injured or killed by any of the shards of the ten-tonne meteor over
the Urals yesterday. But I am extremely curious
about the actual meteorite which crashed into the lake outside Chebarkul, and
hope that divers get sent down to examine it as soon as possible, although the
lake apparently remains iced over until May.

Aphrodite's Message to Cyprus

Pagan Greek gods—or usually goddesses—often
send messages in the form of meteorites. Astronomers and geologists
still argue whether the conical stone found near the temple of Aphrodite at
Paphos in Cyprus is a meteorite. That is, of course, to miss the point, which
was that in sending the rock Aphrodite was showing her good taste in islands in clearly indicating the one
where she wanted her worship to be centred.

Artemis,
too, took the form of a sky-fallen rock at the temple of Artemis Pergeia in
southern Turkey. [Eternal thanks to Prof. I. Rutherford of Reading University for querying my earlier allegation that it was Hera]. And the great Asiatic mother goddess Cybele was worshipped in
the form of a black stone cone in Phrygia. The Romans purloined it in 205 BC since the
Sibylline Oracle told them that it would help keep the Carthaginians at bay.

"That was like shitting a brick"

Meteorites can also have a
useful emetic function. Because Zeus’ father, Cronos, swallowed all his other
children when they were born, his wife Rhea gave him a meteorite wrapped in a
cloth and said it was a new baby. This made him sick. Zeus retrieved the stone
and recycled it to mark the centre of the world at Delphi.

So what is the message delivered to Chebarkul? Perhaps Artemis is getting in touch.
She was worshipped at Ephesus and Tauris (the Crimea, not far
from the Urals) in the form not of meteorites but of statues which fell from the sky. She might
be wrathful at the Russian government for imprisoning Pussy Riot. I would love to think there is now a statue of
Artemis at the bottom of Lake Chebarkul, or even an emetic. But there is another, more alarming possibility.

Is something like this in the lake?

Chebarkul was part of the realm
of the ancient Scythian nomads, and they believed that the world was created
when a meteorite in the form of a lump of gold fell onto their land from the
sky; the first man to pick it up became the first king (Herodotus 4.5).

Vladimir Putin, who is of course an
experienced scuba diver, is presumably planning to get himself over there quickly. He needs to
grab the new meteorite before anyone else declares himself to be Monarch of the World.

Saturday, 9 February 2013

‘The
trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in’, said the wise Dennis Potter. But for Angela Merkel, re-used (i.e. plagiarised) words
are becoming a liability. She
has a knack of appointing ministers with dodgy PhDs.

Two
years ago her ambitious Defence Minister, Karl-Theodor von Guttenberg, was forced to
step down when it was mysteriously revealed that he had copied large sections of his 2006
University of Bayreuth dissertation, ‘Constitution and Constitutional Treaty’,
from sources to which he had given no credit. Since he lives in a castle, the
German press nicknamed him ‘Baron Cut-and-Paste, Zu Copyberg and Zu Googleberg.’

Baron Cut-and-Paste, Zu Copyberg Zu Googleberg

Now
it is the turn of the Minister of—wait for it—Education, responsible for universities and research
funding. Annette Schavan has just resigned after a committee at Düsseldorf
University ruled that she be stripped of her PhD qualification since much of her
thesis, ‘Character and Conscience,’ was abducted
from other sources including a recent Polish dissertation. [The Chair of the special enquiry committee was an
eminent Roman Historian named Prof. Dr. Bruno Bleckmann, who presumably knows about how
to spot cheats and liars since one of his books is called Fiktion als Geschichte (Fiction
as History)].

In
Schavan’s case, the plagiarism was outed by an anonymous blogger widely believed
to have been politically motivated. Schavan is very unpopular with the Y-chromosome
bearers in her own party, who use her unmarried status and fondness for privacy
to spread rumours that she is a lesbian. Even her friendship with Merkel has attracted sniggers.

What
this means, of course, is the 21st-century way of bringing down
political enemies is not to enquire about whether they have ever inhaled or had
an affair, but to go through all their student writings. Having been in Higher Education for too many
decades, I can confidently predict that many more ripped-off theses slapped
together by ambitious politicians await to be exposed.

'Any good phrases I can abduct?'

Meanwhile,
a word of advice to current undergraduates. Almost
all the culprits I have busted for plagiarism over the last two decades have
given themselves away by using a long and interesting word or a correct syntactical or grammatical
form. If you are going to use words that
were formed in other people’s mouths, then you need to rewrite them to sound as if they have come out of the mouth of a modern undergraduate.

For
example, in an essay on the play Alcestis, if
you want to plagiarise a sentence like ‘Notwithstanding Heracles’
witty characterisation as an inebriate, Euripides’ dark implication that fate is
ineluctable shimmers beneath the surface of the text’, you must wreck that accurate placement of
the genitive apostrophe. Moreover, you need to take out the long words and
writee.g. ‘Although Heracles is drunk, Euripides view is
that life is, like, pants.’

This
kind of dumbing down takes time and intellectual effort. It is HONESTLY quicker
to write your own words. And if you ever want to go into politics, it is certainly
less likely to get you sacked.

The Latin verb from
which plagiarise is derived is violent,
meaning 'catch a human in a hunting net
and kidnap them for the slave trade’.

Saturday, 2 February 2013

With great relief we were told this week that as citizens of
a country still in the European Union (whatever spooky plans David Cameron may be
hatching) we did NOT have to be examined by the Erfurt Foreigner Office before
being allowed to stay.

I could stop
going over in my mind the horrible memories of the interview experience as a “guest”
worker in 1978 in (non-EU) German-speaking Switzerland. These had included a medical
examination of my teeth and private parts, an interrogation about my religious
views, and having my passport handed over to my tyrannical employer, manager of
a winter sports hotel near Interlaken.

At Athens, foreigners WERE invited to the party

Although they had their faults, the ancient Athenians knew a
thing or two about how to treat the guests residing in their city. Even the staunchest critics of Athens seem to
have been impressed by its cosmopolitan atmosphere: one anti-democratic
pamphleteer, by custom called ‘the Old Oligarch’, observed that the Athenian
instinct to ‘mingle with various peoples’ made their
city the most colourful and well-resourced in the world;eight centuries later, Julian, the last pagan Emperor, said that the
Athenians still made strangers more welcome than any other people, Greek or
non-Greek, in the world. I don't think the resident aliens in Athens had their bottoms inspected before they were allowed to join in public processions.

This can’t be said about the bureaucrats of Illinois. I don’t
want to be a party-pooper on the birthday of the Territory of Illinois, recognised
as an entity on 3rd February 1809. But our warm welcome in theformer DDR has reminded me of the worst xenophobia
I have personally ever suffered.

Illinois School Nurse Look-alike

Our children needed to go to the local state school in
Illinois for a semester. A year before we arrived, I had investigated the State
Education Board policy on immunisation. Our poor offspring received a large
number of injections in accordance with its stern stipulations. But when we
turned up at the Board’s offices, clutching all the certificates, we were told
by a mountainous nurse that the injections had not been spaced out the correct
number of weeks, that UK medics clearly knew nothing about immunisation, and that our
children were absolutely barred from school.

Fortunately, after arguing fruitlessly for an hour, and
managing not to ask why she looked so like John Travolta in drag in Hairspray, it suddenly
occurred to me that in the Land of The Free there must be a religious exemption
clause. I thereupon had a miraculous conversion to a religion which did not allow
immunisation. The children’s father twigged and simultaneously
had one too.

Zwingli, still proselytizing in the 21st century

I couldn’t remember the words "Jehovah’s Witness". But for
some reason the Reformation Swiss Protestant Ulrich Zwingli leapt into my head,
and I told the nurse I was now converted to Zwinglianism. [This was all very
unfair on Pastor Zwingli, since immunisation had not been invented in the 1500s].
Delighted that I had come up with a complete fabrication on which we could all
agree, the nurse allowed the children, despite the lethal threat they presented to public health, to go straight to school.

Somewhere in a file in the offices of the State Education
Board in Evanston, Illinois, is the signed testament to our conversion. Dank
sei Gott that there has been no need to
produce an equivalent document in Germany. The EU has a purpose, after all.